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Fresh Scenery

This last month has been a good one for getting out and shooting some fresh images. A long contract that I’d been working on in my ‘day job’ ended, and it’s given me some lovely free time to ‘just go shoot’ – I’ve been out most days with the camera, both close to home, and on far shores.

The time has enabled me to capture some different images, which has been refreshing for me personally. I still get a massive kick out of my staple type images – dramatic landscapes, dramatic light, ethereal locations – but, those things are not always possible, so shooting different types of images keeps things interesting. Techniques like ‘intentional camera movement’ (ICM), aerial views, more intimate scenes of light – they’re a nice distraction, and give me different challenges to consider photographically. I’ve been down this road a bit for a while now with some Macros, and trying abstracts – it’s all so enjoyable!

Here’s a few examples of those type of images that I’ve been able to make in recent weeks :

This first one is from the Torridon area of North West Scotland – a lovely scenic place. The weather on my trip here was quite flat on some days, so I was looking for things to shoot, and these trees which were damaged by fire seemed a perfect fit for a spot of ICM. The tripod that I use has a vertical height adjustment shaft that makes the movement to capture this type of photo fairly easy. The contrast with the torched trunks, and the long grass that this patch of trees resides in make for some great shades of complimentary colour in the image:

Catching Aerial photos really requires Drone use, and I’ve taken the plunge on a Mavic quite recently. I was worried about the quality after having owned the Phantom 3, which had a dire camera on. I needn’t have been concerned – this little thing is quite fantastic, and at the size of a 70-200 lens, it’s now a permanent fixture in my camera bag, while I look for opportunities to fly it. I really like the top-down type of images that are a bit abstract, and while I need to practice with the drone quite a bit to get great images, this one from the Solheim Glacier in Iceland was quite interesting to me – it reminded me of Yin and Yang for some reason:

I’ver established a new gallery for my Aerial shots here on my site – there’s only a few, but now that I have the right kit to achieve the image quality I’d like, traded against great portability, the gallery should grow in the coming months..

Last up for now is a moment of rather nice light from close to home in the last week or so. We’ve had some cracking foggy mornings, where the atmosphere is fabulous, but those type of conditions don’t lend themselves to great panoramic type landscapes. They are however ( in my opinion, anyway ) good for Forest type scenes, where light streams through trees – this game is all about light!! This genre of landscapes is new to me – I’m not sure it’s my favourite, but I like to try these things, and see if I can produce decent work. Most of what was on my camera from wandering on these mornings goes straight in the ‘crap’ bin, but I am getting 1 or 2 images that I can be happy with – perhaps it’s a case of practicing to develop my compositional sense with this stuff a bit – here it is :

This one has been added to another new Gallery for my site – dedicated to my home county of Sussex, which I have great love for. It’ll be another area that will be getting new work regularly, I’d imagine.

Having said all that, I’ve had a lovely time out shooting ‘my type’ of image over October – there’s a few in my ‘Recent Images‘ gallery already, and quite a few more to come, when I’ve processed them properly.